Site Mobile Navigation

Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia

David Rohde of The New York Times in the Helmand region of Afghanistan in 2007.Credit
Tomas Munita for The New York Times

For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban.

But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia.

Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times.

But Wikipedia, which operates under the philosophy that anyone can be an editor, and that all information should be public, is a vastly different world.

A dozen times, user-editors posted word of the kidnapping on Wikipedia’s page on Mr. Rohde, only to have it erased. Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing — a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse that clearly angered the people who were trying to spread the information of the kidnapping.

Even so, details of his capture cropped up time and again, however briefly, showing how difficult it is to keep anything off the Internet — even a sentence or two about a person who is not especially famous.

The sanitizing was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times. In an interview, Mr. Wales said that Wikipedia’s cooperation was not a given.

“We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source,” he said. “I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.”

Mr. Rohde was kidnapped in Afghanistan on Nov. 10, along with his interpreter and their driver. Two days after the kidnapping, a Wikipedia user altered the entry on Mr. Rohde to emphasize his work that could be seen as sympathetic to Muslims, like his reporting on Guantánamo, and his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims. Mr. Rohde won a Pulitzer Prize for his Bosnia coverage in 1996, when he worked for The Christian Science Monitor.

The Wikipedia editor in that case was Michael Moss, an investigative reporter at The Times and friend of Mr. Rohde who has written extensively about groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Like many Wikipedia editors, he adopted a user name that hid his true identity.

“I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he’d done, what his value to them might be,” he said. “I’d never edited a Wikipedia page before.”

With his editors’ blessing, Mr. Moss had already made similar changes to Mr. Rohde’s “topic page” on The Times’s Web site, and in both cases he omitted the name of Mr. Rohde’s former employer, because it contained the word Christian.

The Wikipedia page history shows that the next day, Nov. 13, someone without a user name edited the entry on Mr. Rohde for the first time to include the kidnapping. Mr. Moss deleted the addition, and the same unidentified user promptly restored it, adding a note protesting the removal. The unnamed editor cited an Afghan news agency report. In the first few days, at least two small news agencies and a handful of blogs reported the kidnapping.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Around that time, Catherine J. Mathis, the chief spokeswoman for the New York Times Company, called Mr. Wales and asked for his help. Knowing that his own actions on Wikipedia draw attention, Mr. Wales turned to an administrator, one of several who would eventually become involved in monitoring and controlling the page.

On Nov. 13, news of the kidnapping was posted and deleted four times within four hours, before an administrator blocked any more changes for three days. On Nov. 16, it was blocked again, for two weeks.

“We didn’t want it to look unusual in some fashion that would draw speculation, so we would protect it for three days, or up to a month, which is pretty normal,” Mr. Wales said. He added, “Weeks would go by before there was a problem.”

Photo

Days after Mr. Rohde was kidnapped in November, editing tussles began on his Wikipedia entry.

On Feb. 10 and 11, two users added the kidnapping information several times to Mr. Rohde’s page, only to see it removed each time, and they attached some heated notes to their additions. “We can do this months,” one said.

An administrator put a rare indefinite block on the page, then changed that to a temporary freeze. One of the would-be editors posted a note saying: “Not gonna work boy genius. Should have stuck to indefinite.”

Most of the attempts to add the information, including the first and the last, came from three similar Internet protocol addresses that correspond to an Internet service provider in Florida, and Wikipedia administrators guessed that they were all the same user.

“We had no idea who it was,” said Mr. Wales, who said there was no indication the person had ill intent. “There was no way to reach out quietly and say ‘Dude, stop and think about this.’ ”

Last Saturday, after Mr. Rohde and the translator, Tahir Ludin, escaped from a Taliban compound in Pakistan, Ms. Mathis e-mailed Mr. Wales before making a public announcement, and Mr. Wales, himself, unfroze the page.

When the news broke Saturday, the user from Florida reposted the information, with a note to administrators that said: “Is that enough proof for you [expletives]? I was right. You were WRONG.”

Joseph M. Reagle, an adjunct professor of communications at New York University who studies Wikipedia, said he was not sure whether its role in suppressing news about Mr. Rohde would prompt an outcry among longtime editors, because in the Rohde case, lives were at stake.

“Wikipedia has, over time, instituted gradually more control because of some embarrassing incidents, particularly involving potentially libelous material, and some people get histrionic about it, proclaiming the death of Wikipedia,” he said. “But the idea of a pure openness, a pure democracy, is a naïve one.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe